EMC Gives Backup a Boost

EMC on Monday overhauled its backup offerings, unveiling a new virtual tape library (VTL), new versions of its data de-duplication, replication and backup software, and new bare metal recovery capabilities.

The announcements came at the EMC World user conference in Orlando, Fla., which attracted more than 7,000 attendees.

EMC said its new VTL, the EMC Disk Library 6000 series, is the industry’s biggest and fastest open systems VTL, packing up to 1.8 petabytes in a single appliance at a rate of more than 11 terabytes per hour. The appliance is based on the EMC Symmetrix DMX-3 storage platform and also uses software from FalconStor.

The storage giant said the new appliance lets users consolidate multiple smaller VTLs into a single EMC DL6000 system, saving as much as 30 percent on power and cooling costs. The new VTL also uses hardware compression to maximize capacity without reducing performance.

EMC also said it will offer data de-duplication across its entire EMC Disk Library family beginning early next year.

“Backup has been a long-term challenge for customers and is one issue we hear about consistently, regardless of their size, industry or budget,” said David Donatelli, EMC’s executive vice president of storage product operations. “It is even more challenging for them in the face of 60% annual information growth. The amount of information customers have to regularly back up can be up to five times that when you factor in duplicate copies.”

The EMC DL6100 supports up to 1,440 disk drives in a single system and offers RAID 5 protection with a maximum useable uncompressed capacity of 615 terabytes and up to 1.845 petabytes of compressed capacity. The EMC DL6300 supports up to 2,400 disk drives in a single system and offers RAID 1 protection with a maximum uncompressed capacity of 584 terabytes, and up to 1.752 petabytes of compressed capacity.

The VTL offers consolidated media management that EMC says gives customers control of their entire tape pool through a single application interface and eliminates many time-consuming steps common with traditional VTL deployments. The appliance also features Active Engine Failover, which automatically fails over operations to the second (active) processor engine in the event that one processor engine fails.

De-duping VMware

EMC also announced data de-duplication capabilities that the company says reduce the time it takes to backup virtual machines by as much as 90 percent.

The capability, included in version 3.7 of the software EMC acquired from Avamar last year, supports VMware Consolidated Backup (VCB) to protect and reduce backup times within and across virtual machines.

Another new feature for EMC Avamar is support for EMC Celerra network attached storage (NAS) systems.

VMware Consolidated Backup, a component of VMware Infrastructure 3, offloads backup to a centralized server, which allows VMware ESX Server to run more virtual machines by reducing its load. VCB also eliminates hardware dependency and enables backup to occur during production hours.

Avamar also received new operating system and application support for HP-UX and Mac OS platforms and Oracle and IBM DB2 databases.

Other announcements from EMC today include:

• EMC HomeBase, new software that provides bare metal recovery of servers and fast automated recovery of server capabilities in the event of a hardware failure or disaster;
• A new version of EMC DiskXtender for NAS that adds support for filers from Network Appliance along with previously supported EMC Celerra systems, enabling inactive file migration and long-term data retention to platforms such as EMC Centera content-addressed storage (CAS) systems, EMC Clariion networked storage, or other storage archives;
• New EMC NetWorker software management features, and
• A new version of EMC RecoverPoint software for continuous remote replication (CRR) and local continuous data protection (CDP). The latest version includes support for Microsoft Volume Shadow Copy Service (VSS), which improves automation and management of backups and restores for applications such as Microsoft Exchange Server and Microsoft SQL Server. EMC has also integrated RecoverPoint and EMC Replication Manager software to centralize management of RecoverPoint local CDP protection in a Microsoft Windows environment.

Pricing for the EMC Disk Library 6000 series starts at $1 million, while EMC Avamar 3.7 starts at $26,500. EMC RecoverPoint 2.4 starts at $83,000. EMC NetWorker 7.4 starts at $1,150 (NetWorker Server Workgroup Edition), and DiskXtender for NAS starts at $5,699. All products will become available over the next month or so.

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